by James Grady
“The point is,” he said sliding into the weapons vest, “if the more things change, the more they remain the same, then why be realistic?”
Lang clicked shut the snaps on the weapons vest. Grinned. “How do I look?”
Arm, left arm pulsing. My lips tingled, but let out: “’ee. Mmm… eee.”
“‘Me’? Don’t be so self-involved.” Lang replaced the stun gun in its vest pouch. He velcroed the tranquilizer gun in its straps near two looped-on flash/bang grenades. “If we talk about just you, you’ll miss the big picture.
“But it’s not a big picture. When your eyes open, you realize it’s tides of movies. Swirls of is and was and might be. If you hear the trillion whispers, you can surf on them. Learn how to shape the waves. The surfer no longer rides, the surfer rules.”
In the dark night of that parking lot, a silver-haired man in a weapons vest leaned from side to side, black gung fu shoes gripping the asphalt as he surfed a tsunami, his arms waving not for balance but to stroke the experience.
Like the bagua adept he was, Lang swooped through a circle, spinning and twisting from surfer to dragon and back again to all of them as a man in a weapon’s vest.
“You fell into a hole in Maine,” he told me. “I got elevated to the inner circle of the National Security Council in the White House where my hands can do… oh so much.”
Foot, can’t move either foot.
Out of my mouth came: “See you. They’ll see you ’razy.”
Lang smiled. “No, all our wise men tend to look out at the world and only see mirrors.”
My tongue licked my lips: “Dr. Friedman.”
“Couldn’t derail the idea to bring a shrink into our midst. Tried to for months. Precedent: during Watergate, national security executives secreted a shrink on the NSC staff because they feared Nixon was nuts and walking around the White House where it’s easy to squeeze triggers—even on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dr. Friedman’s CIA file called him a ‘spotter.’ He might have spotted me.”
Lang walked into the cone of light.
Said: “I couldn’t risk that. Getting locked up. I wasn’t going to let Dr. Friedman make me into one of you mad dogs. Hey, I’m a lucky man. I like who I am.”
My arms tingled. Flex them.
“Friedman was going to temporary duty in Maine before meeting me,” said Lang. “I knew I had to kill him where there’d be a safe, logical explanation for his murder. New York is a classic killing ground, but he was coming straight to his new job. I had to stop him from showing up where I was. Plus, the five of you were perfect to frame. I found someone to deal with him, a military nurse who was a junkie. Persuadable out of patriotism plus fear of jail and her own permanent termination. Trainable by a vet who thought he was working for SAD.
“In a world where people accept only what someone says they ‘have a need to know,’ a visionary voice assumes awesome power.”
Something rubbed the pavement with a harsh sound.
I craned my neck, forced my shoulders off the asphalt to see—
Cari, trying to stand, her right hand pawing her empty holster.
Velcro ripped open as Lang strode to her. Said: “Relax.”
Lang shot a tranquilizer dart into Cari’s leg.
“Agent Rudd,” he said as he pulled the dart out of her limp body and set it on the pile he’d made of our gear, “just lay there and listen like a good spy.”
He re-strapped the tranquilizer gun on the vest beside the grenades, drew the stun gun from its pouch, gave Zane and Russell each a third zap.
I struggled up on my elbows. Legs attached to my numb body stretched dead before me. I saw Eric hugging Hailey tight as they stood near the white Caddy, tears running down their cheeks.
“Your fault, Vic,” said Lang. “Even if the lower echelons would have called Friedman a murder, nothing too bad would have happened to you obvious suspects.”
“Say’ you.”
“Yes,” said Lang. “As your creator, says me.
“And this!” He waved his arm. “I loved your escape! I was rooting for you to vanish, I really was. But did you heed my warning? Did you run? No. That was stupid.”
“Stubb’rn.”
“Words words words!” he said. “What silly things they are. We need to work.
“Besides, Vic,” said the man who’d molded me into the mad dog I was, “I’m finally giving you what you want. You rebelling and breaking out of the Castle is your third suicide. Only this time, you get to succeed.”
There it was: dead-on truth. All I had to do was lay there and I’d get what I’d sought for so long—freedom from the pain of responsibility. All I had to do was forget about everyone else Lang had trapped in this dark night. All I had to not think about were the global millions who this maniac spymaster of the world’s only empire could caress with his cold crazy hands.
“We never get to pick our time,” I’d told Derya. “We only get to pick what we do.”
And as Lang held my only living friends and me in his trap of that parking lot night, he said: “Do you know what we have here?”
His gesture swept over everything: The cone of light where he stood and where I sprawled on my elbows. The pile of pistols and gear beside the shocked-out heaps of Zane and Russell. Cari slumped to even greater numbness from the neurotoxin than me. Hailey trapped in Eric’s embrace beside the white Cadillac.
“What we have here,” said Lang, “is an answer to evolve. All we need to do is take what we’ve got and spin it to a productive truth.
“Frenzy foils forensics,” he said. “Five escaped mad dogs. One innocent hostage, a brave CIA agent, kidnapped, killed in the line of duty. Our connections, the Maine asylum reports marking you as the pack’s leader. Stolen cars, you stormed my house. Shot it up. Snatched me out here. Why? Who knows, you’re all crazy.”
Stall: “They’ll check y’r hard-drive. Look for oth’ tracks.”
“Good!” said Lang. “Role play me to be sure we’ve got it right. But don’t worry. The only reason for gumshoes to check my machine is to match the bullets to guns you mad dogs fired. Plus, I bet Russell destroyed my computer drives. I built those trapdoors, and when I triggered them by doing the routine any intruder would have used, those systems got wiped. The SAD building—no one knows you were there. Those matrices, your index cards somebody might shuffle into a pattern that shows I’m Kyle Russo. I’m thinking… Why not a fire?”
See it! Vision! A chance. The five of us hanging from the crane. A pillar of smoke above a mall. A wreck on a dark night highway. A ghost movie projected on an apartment ceiling. But the new movie had a ticket price figured in blood. No matter how the minor plot details spun out, I’d have to pay the price. And so would my only friends on earth.
Then and there, I realized the bottom line of being alive:
Sometimes all any of us can do is choose which crazy wins.
Lang said: “Let me spin you and the real world… an explosion.
“A frantic gun battle as Agent Rudd and I break free. She’s the hero. Grabs a gun, blasts away. I get one, too—not mine, that’s too easy. I’ve kept my prints off all but the barrels on your pistols, though it’s long odds that that matters. Especially if there’s some kind of explosion and fire.
“Wait!” Lang’s eyes blazed. “Afterwards, I do the spy thing and valiantly clean the scene up while I’m waiting for rescue! Clean it up to cover this mess all under wraps, no reporters, no Congressional snooping! And that brilliant, responsible effort on top of all the other evidence, that makes this a pure, credible, desirable truth!
“Our only big question is,” he said with a frown, “who dies first?”
Numb from the waist down, my arms too poisoned to do more than prop me on my elbows, I said: “You do.”
Ever so slowly, his face turned from whispers of a future to see me
staring up at him from the asphalt parking lot of now. And he said: “Really.”
Drawing a deep breath meant breaking steel bands circling my chest, but I did it and as loudly as I could said: “Essential nature.”
A frown scarred his image. “Is this your mad dogs’ illusion? That it’s my essential nature and therefore… what?”
But the fight to regain my breath robbed me of the power to reply.
“Or are you asking when?” said Lang. “When did I realize my essential nature? I was always… unique. Ironically, the sniper shot of my self-awareness happened after our last meeting. Are you still trying to succeed with suicide?”
Words spit from lips: “Essential nature!”
“That’s what I’m telling you! My awakening came in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House the night after 9/11 while smoke and dust swirled around New York, across the river at the Pentagon, in that Pennsylvania field. The best minds in our marblized politics were huddled around the Sit Room table and every one of them wanted to know why.
“Out of me burst: ‘Why not?’
“Believe me, I had to dissemble that careless wisdom to stay in the room!”
For the third time, I forced out: “Essential nature!”
“Of what?” Lang yelled. “Of visionaries like us? Of a spy? The essential nature of a spy is to deceive and manipulate, to lie and die.”
Chest burning, heaving. Heart pounding ’gainst crushing ribs. Roaring in my skull. White—Don’t zone out! Can’t say it! Got to say it. Can’t do it! No better choice.
My eyes went from Lang to the white Cadillac where Eric held Hailey locked in his embrace. That couples’ eyes found mine as my soul tore to free the words: “Not him!”
Lang said: “‘Not him’ means not me? ‘Essential nature’?”
Hailey’s face glowed in something like a smile: “Eric! Obey the boss’s order! Make it worth it! Hold me so we’ll be together forever!”
Her command rode within the horrors Eric had no choice but to obey, rode within them and swelled them into a vision shaped by the essential nature of his loving heart.
Lang whirled towards Eric and Hailey, his own essential nature sensing danger. He ripped the tranquilizer gun from it straps—empty. But he was a man keen on close quarter combat and he charged the intertwined couple standing beside the white beast. He swung the tranquilizer gun—smashed it into Hailey’s blocking arm as Eric bear hugged her waist. Lang’s backswing slammed the short club below her face-blocking arms, hit her breasts above Eric’s encircling grip and she cried out—
Grabbed Lang and pulled him close.
Lang flowed with his attacker. Three intertwined bodies slammed into the Caddy. Eric twisted with all his pudgy might and they spun around on the side of the car. Lang’s back slammed against metal. The force of that collision flung the tranquilizer gun from his grip. Hailey held him close with one hand—sank her other hand like a claw over his mouth so that all he could articulate were gurgled screams and grunts. Eric obeyed orders and held her tight with one hand, used his other to pound the boss.
The boss who mashed against the windows of the Caddy doors. The boss who fought to stay on his feet as Eric pistoned his legs to crush their huddle against the car.
They slid along the front door, to the back door.
The silver-haired spymaster slammed the stun gun prongs into Eric.
A jolt of electricity shot through Eric—no: another bolt of electricity crackled through this man who’d endured a hundred worse shocks. This bolt zapped through his back to his chest—and then conducted through him as a diffused charge shocking the two people Eric pinned to the metal car.
Eric trembled, dazed. Hailey slumped, her hands falling to her sides. She might have fallen, but Eric held her tight. Holding her meant holding the shocked Lang, whose sheer insane will kept him upright as their intertwined trio slid to the rear of the car.
Hailey’s hand brushed the gas tank cap an instant after consciousness returned to her eyes. Brushed it as Lang regained strength.
“Eric!” she cried.
With a twist of her wrist, a jerk of her arm, she thrust what she held between their three faces for all of them to see: the cap to the Caddy’s gas tank.
Eric yelled: “Hold me forever!”
Was he repeating? Was he asking? Was he telling? I never knew.
As Hailey yelled back: “Yes!”
And Eric reached into the bundle of flesh pinned against the rear of the Caddy, found the pins on the two flash/bang grenades in the vest Lang wore.
Pulled them free.
I saw two grenade safety handles spin out of the trio—threw my back to the pavement, my hands flopping over my face with its already-signed off eyebrows.
Two flash/bang grenades burst as one bright white spark-throwing flame beside the Caddy’s fume-spewing open gas tank.
The white beast roared a tremendous explosion and an orange fireball lit the night. Over the prone forms of four spies on the blacktop blew the big heat.
55
The clean up of the accidental explosion of a federal waste disposal truck parked beside an old car near the waterfront of the wildlife preserve near Parkton, Maryland was almost complete by 11:15 that next morning, Day Nine of our whacko crusade. Husky workers in lumpy coveralls waved a carload of five teenagers away from the entrance to the parking lot, telling them: “It stinks down there. Couple of our guys even threw up.”
The Alpha girl in the group told her friends: “I can smell it. Smells kind of like gasoline and burned rubber and… eew! Burned hair and stuff!”
The teenagers drove back to their boring hometown where no one ever had to sentence his friends to die. They counted themselves lucky for not getting caught skipping school and to keep their cover intact, told no adults about what they hadn’t seen.
By 11:15, the charred skeleton of a 1959 white Cadillac had been winched into the cargo box of a huge truck, swallowed by that darkness as if it had never been.
Other things had been bagged and hauled away in unmarked panel vans.
By 11:15, the local banker had satisfied FBI credentialed men who were officially investigating a ring of cashier check thieves. His information complimented ours and added up to an Op Finding initially scoffed at in the darkness of First Response that, by 11:15, became both credible and true.
Which meant by that 11:15, SAD gunners—who’d surrounded Zane, Russell and I when they showed up—relaxed and left us alone.
We three maniacs stood at the shoreline.
By 11:15, the sky was blue. The waters of the ocean inlet in front of us had calmed to easy ripples. Birds glided overhead. Each of our inhales bore less and less of the stench of explosion and fire death.
Russell said: “Was what they both wanted, Vic.”
Zane said: “You didn’t get them anything they hadn’t signed on for.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Not like before,” said Russell.
“Never is.”
The water rippled.
“But both times,” Russell told me, “you played the best gig you had.”
Finally, I believed that. Said: “Guess I am a hard man to kill. Guess that’s OK.”
“’Xactly. And we’re damn lucky to still be here.”
The water rippled.
Russell held out his hand. We watched it tremble. He shrugged. “Anybody want the meds they offered us?”
“Nah,” I said. “Saying no got me this far. With a lot of help from my friends.”
“Breakthroughs,” said Zane. “All of us.”
“All of us who made it,” said Russell, staring at the fire smeared pavement.
“We all made it,” I said. “Welcome to the other side.”
“Too bad your GODS were in the Caddy,” Zane told me. “The picture of De
rya. The snow globe.”
I shrugged. “Maybe not.”
“‘Not’ is not more coffee,” said Russell. “My heart will pound out of my ribs.”
“And I’ll have to pee… again,” said Zane.
“I don’t want to drive,” I said. “Not for awhile.”
Russell said: “Do you believe them? About us not having to go back to the Castle after the next couple days of de-briefs—if we don’t want to.”
My shrug came easy. “Well, we busted out once. Lucky we’re still crazy.”
The three of us laughed.
A seagull screed overhead.
“Of course, they could always medicate us with a lead pill,” said Russell.
“The ultimate in mental health treatment.” I shook my bullet-free skull. “They need us. They won a great spin. They saved the world from a homicidal maniac running amok in the White House. We’re the proof of their success, even if we’re a secret.”
Russell shuffled, shrugged: “I might go back.”
Zane and I stared at him.
“Not to stay,” he said. “But… I’m not sure the real world is ready for my encore.”
Couldn’t help myself, I tousled his hair like he was my kid brother.
And he grinned.
Cari split off from Agency bishops and joined us. “We’re going now.”
“OK,” I said. “Where?”
“Ahh…” She looked at Zane.
He looked at me.
Russell stared at the rippling water.
“Vic,” said Zane, “I’m not with you anymore.”
“We’re together,” said Cari. She took Zane’s hand in hers.
“What?”
Russell stared at the rippling water.
“It’s been a long trip,” she said. “For everybody.”
Remember looks. Words. Sounds. Closed motel room doors.
“Who knew about this?” I whispered.
Russell said: “Everybody but you.”